and sympathised with him.  He replied that it didn’t make the difference to him which I might think.  I felt as if a stream of ice-water had been turned down my back on Christmas Day.  However, he went on in a sort of shame-faced style, like a schoolboy caught talking sentiment.  “One owes her a debt for having cared for her, and the debt remains.”  He stayed out his visit and left this morning.  He goes to Switzerland, and asked for your address.  His is The Bear, Grindelwald.  Write to him there; better, join him.  He talks of going out to Matanga later in the year for a few months.  So there’s the end of the business, or rather one hopes so.  I used to hope that Clarice would wake up some morning into a real woman and find herself—­isn’t that the phrase?  I hope the reverse now; that she and her husband will philander along to the close of the chapter.  But I prefer your word,—­to the close of the “comedy,” say.  It implies something artificial.  Mallinson and Clarice give me that impression,—­as of Watteau figures mincing a gavotte, and made more unreal by the juxtaposition of a man.  Let’s hope they will never perceive the flimsiness of their pretty bows and ribbons!  But I think of your one o’clock in the morning of the masquerade ball, and frankly I am afraid.  I look at the three without—­well, with as little prejudice as weak woman may.  Mallinson, you know him—­always on the artist’s see-saw between exaltation and despair.  Doesn’t that make for shiftiness generally?  Clarice I don’t understand; but I incline to your idea of her as at the mercy of every momentary emotion, and the more for what has happened this week.  Since her engagement she seems to have lost her fear of Stephen Drake.  She has been all unexpressed sympathy.  And Drake?  There’s the danger, I am sure—­a danger not of the usual kind.  Had he been unscrupulous he might have ridden roughshod over Clarice long before now.  But he’s too scrupulous for that.  I think that he misses greatness as we understand it, through excess of scruple.  But there’s that saying of his about a debt incurred to Clarice by the man caring for her.  Well, convince him that he can pay it by any sacrifice; won’t he pay it?  Convince him that it would benefit her if he lay in the mud; wouldn’t he do it?  I don’t know.  I made a little prayer yesterday night, grotesque enough, but very sincere, that there might be no fifth act of tragedy to make a discord of your comedy.’

Fielding received Mrs. Willoughby’s command to join Drake with a grin at her conception of him as fit company for a gentleman disappointed in his love-affairs.  He nevertheless obeyed it, and travelling to Grindelwald found Drake waiting him on the platform with the hands of an oakum-picker, and a face toned uniformly to the colour of a ripe pippin.  ‘You have been climbing mountains, I suppose?’ asked Fielding.

‘Yes,’ nodded Drake.

’Well, don’t ask me to join you.  It produces a style of conversation I don’t like.’